Reminder: Proposals due for managing national science competition, plus student quotes

The deadline approaches for applications from experienced organizations to lead one of the nation’s premier STEM research competitions. Through the Junior Science and Humanities Symposium, thousands of high school students across the nation present their research projects and compete for scholarship prizes. The regional winners are then invited to a national symposium, to compete for even more scholarships and meet leading researchers from labs across the nation.

Battelle and the Tri-Service partnership of Army, Navy and Air Force seek a managing organization for the program. Read the details on the Army Educational Outreach Program’s site . Proposals are due August 3, 2018 at 5 p.m. EST. Submit here .

To provide a little inspiration to all of the organizations applying tomorrow, here are three quotes from students Battelle interviewed earlier this year:

I’m in 11th grade, and my favorite subject is probably science…Our project was about how caffeine affected the plant growth of soybean plants. We found out that soybean plants can die and be harmed by caffeine…I like the way caffeine makes people jittery, and i wanted to see if it would help the plants grow and to see if that would happen. but, unfortunately, it didn’t. It made them die, or stop growing.

It was very fun, we got to stay at the Great Wolf Lodge, which was a great experience because I’ve never been there… I’m excited to learn what everybody else is doing. Like, learning from them exactly what I need on my poster, or maybe some questions I could ask the judges during my presentation.

I’m very excited about it. Well, for starters I’ve been working on my own studies on bacteriophages to find, potentially find a cure for tuberculosis, which I’m excited about.  Because  there’s only one other page that might be used to cure tuberculosis, but it’s definitely a big thing because TB doesn’t have a cure for it. It’s something that people have been studying, and the only way that a patient can survive TB is if their body can fight it. But if we can actually find a phage that can infect the bacterium and kill it, then we would be able to find a cure for tuberculosis, which would be a great breakthrough. And I’m just super excited to be a part of that. So, this summer, I’ll be doing the summer program and do more research, potentially find more samples, and just get a new learning experience that will help me later on.